• Surveying the XML landscape
• The business benefits of XML
• Exchanging data with XML: RSS, Ajax, Web Services

XML document structure

•  The document root and prologue
•  Elements
• Attributes
•  Entities
•  Namespaces
•  Differentiating well-formed and valid documents
•  Exploiting popular XML editing tools

XML design and data mapping

•  Elements vs. attributes
•  Design techniques
• Designing an XML document from a requirements document

Distinguishing dialects with namespaces

• Adhering to proper naming conventions
• Eliminating document ambiguity with namespaces
• Defining namespaces using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI)

The XML processing models

•  Document Object Model
• Event-driven processing
•  Navigating a document with XPath
• Querying a document with XQuery
•  Event-driven vs. tree-based models

Communicating with databases using XML

• Database storage options
• Retrieving database results as XML
• Reformatting database results with XQuery
• Storing XML with a native XML data type

Processing information with the DOM

•  Navigating XML documents
•   Extracting and modifying data
•  Building XML documents from scratch
•  Creating element and text nodes

Constraining XML structure and content

• Defining an XML structure with Document Type Definitions (DTDs)
• Building XML schemas to validate XML structure/data

Validation with XML schemas

•  XML schema syntax and components
• Specifying valid elements and attributes
• Encapsulating business rules in XML schemas
•  Leveraging schema datatypes

Extending schemas

• Importing existing schemas
•  Leveraging modular schemas
• Defining custom user-defined types

The power of XML transformation

• Converting XML documents to adhere to schemas
•  Processing documents with pattern matching
• Specifying output format with templates
• XSL best practices

Applying style to data

•  Formatting XML data for presentation
• Styling XML for display as HTML and PDF

Searching and filtering with XPath

• Formatting and sequencing XML data
•  Sorting, grouping and filtering output

Securing XML applications

•  Implementing transport security
•  Encrypting XML data
• Enabling SOAP security with WS-Security

Integrating applications with XML

• Communicating with XML messaging
• Investigating Web Services, SOAP and WSDL
•  Enabling an Ajax-powered web page with XML